The GNOME developers behind the Maps application distributed as part of the GNOME Stack announced today the availability of an important release of the project since it lost access to the MapQuest service.

As reported
by us two weeks ago, GNOME Maps lost its free map tile service, MapQuest. Why? Simply because the free online web mapping service owned by AOL has decided that it's time to disabled access to their free feed.

Since then, projects like GNOME Maps that relied on the MapQuest service for fetching tiles had no other chance but to move to an alternative, which is pretty hard to find these days, at least according to the developers behind the open source project.

On July 30, 2016, the GNOME Maps 3.20.2 stable release have been made available for download, and it promises functional maps again, thanks to the implementation of a community API (Application Programming Interface) key from Mapbox.

"Mapbox is a company with a commitment to Open source. And provides infrastructure that will allow us to do more with Maps. We are accessing the Mapbox API through a GNOME proxy that will allow us to easier switch our tile provider/URI in the future," said the devs.

GNOME Maps 3.21.4 is available as well

Since the GNOME Maps 3.20.1 update, the GNOME Maps 3.20.2 release also fixes escaping of "tel:" URIs, adapt the colors of instruction during printing of routes, and updates various language translations, such as for Turkish, Indonesian, Polish, Portuguese, and Norwegian Bokmål languages.

Now that the GNOME 3.21.4 development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, due for release on September 21, 2016, has been made available for public testing, the GNOME Maps devs have also released today the GNOME Maps 3.21.4 milestone. Download GNOME Maps 3.20.2 and 3.21.4
right now via our website.